For most of the past two-and-a-half years, I’ve been alone.

Tonight, for the first time in a very long time, I noticed.

I figure that’s probably a good sign.

You need to get a “day pass” to Salon to read this entire article:

Salon.com News | The atheist

It’s an interview with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

The day pass is free. You just have to sit through an ad. And it’s worth it. I think Dawkins qualifies as one of the bravest men on the planet.

The *Hard Time: Season 2* #3 script is finished.

Next week, the editor of the book — the ever-forbearing Joan Hilty — and I will engage in our ritual monthly gladiatorial match over plot points, characterizations, speech patterns, and what does and does not constitute gratuitous obfuscation.

As if *I* would ever obfuscate gratuitously…!

Abou t ready to stumble off to bed, entering the land of fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff the land of leaning on the keyboard wtihout realizing. I am plagued with gingivitis and an unknown skin-devouring condition I call, alternately, Poogroch Circles and ‘The Cysts that Don’t Exist”, at least no Las Vegas dermatologist believes they do. The painful little bits (of hard yeast, I suspect) are sometimes not visible except as little bumps on the skin of my neck and the back of my head. They are more than that. They are painful. They can tear my concentration to shreds, because they can make it impossible to turn my head, even in a glance, without pain. Maybe this will become a resesarch project for the future. Cyst Trek…. 😉

I’m going to cheat. I didn’t write this. I don’t know who did. Mary Skrenes forwarded it to me as an email some months ago.

It may or may not be true, but I have no trouble believing it.

Does the statement, “We’ve always done it that way” ring any bells?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an odd number, don’t you think? Why was that ‘gauge’ used?

Because that’s the way they built railroads in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads. Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the ‘gauge’ they used. Why did “they” use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Okay!

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

And bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Now the twist to the story…

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.

I’m barely half a day from finishing the script. I’ve been mentally storing up a few rants, and I still owe you on my promise of more information about *Hard Time: Season 2*. I haven’t forgotten.

Okay, I think this is very cool:

Do a Yahoo seach for “stevegerblog” and then, when the search results come up, click on the “Add to My Yahoo” link next to the entry for this site.

Yahoo picks up the RSS feed from this site, and the headlines of new posts appear in a separate section on your “My Yahoo” page, just like the headlines from Reuters and the Washington Post. (Don’t be concerned if the headlines don’t appear right away. The syndication feeds sometimes take a little while — hours, not days — to update.)

This works for *any* site that runs an RSS feed, of course.

The *Hard Time* script is almost done. Back to “real” posts shortly.

According to feedvalidator.org, RSS from this site is now working.

(Thanks to Coldforged, macmanx, and gisli on the WordPress Support Forum.)

There’s a problem with the RSS feeds from this site. If you’ve experienced it, please add a comment to this post and let me know exactly what happened.(If possible, include the text of any error message you get.) For the next day or two I’ll still be submerged finishing up the *Hard Time* script, but I’ll look into the problem as soon as I resurface.

I’m still a few pages from finishing the script, but it couldn’t wait any longer. I sent out the stuff I had done to the editor and artist.

I hate doing that.

Mary hates it even more than I do.

Sending out an incomplete script, even if it’s just a few pages short, is like sending out an engraved invitation to pick the thing apart. It’s not even the editor’s fault. It’s somehow human nature to perceive a *nearly* finished project — even if it’s, say, 85 out of 86 stories of the Empire State Building — as far more malleable than a finished one.

I have to learn to write faster.

There are lots of things that are hipper (maybe), lots of things that are more contemporary, lots of things that will get you more girls and more respect from Vertigo readers — and more girl Vertigo readers — but sometimes there’s just no substitute for the tonic effect of the Beach Boys’ “Fun Fun Fun” blasting through a pair of headphones.

She walks, looks, and drives like an ace, and screw anybody who’s too conventionally cool to deal with it.

The script is coming along okay, I think, but I’m working vampire hours again, and I had been trying to keep to a day schedule. That’s always been difficult for me. I was born at 12:01 a.m. I’m noctournal by nature.